Noted countercultural icon Robert Anton Wilson passed away on January 11, 2007. This episode is a tribute to this American genius. We discuss RAW’s life, work and words, with audio clips from the Maybe Logic documentary, including interviews about the man with Paul Krassner, Rev. Ivan Stang, and Tom Robbins.

The website for Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson (kindly provided audio for this episode)

Wilson, Robert Anton and Robert Shea. (1975). This Illuminatus! Trilogy. Dell Publishing.
Wilson, Robert Anton. (1977). Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati. New Falcon.
Wilson, Robert Anton. (1983). Prometheus Rising. New Falcon.

Everybody understands that you cannot drink the word “water”, and yet virtually nobody seems entirely free of semantic delusions entirely comparable to trying to drink the ink-stains that form the word “water” on this page or the sound waves produced when I say “water” aloud. If you say, “The word is not the thing,” everybody agrees placidly; if you watch people, you see that they continue to behave as if something called Sacred “really is” Sacred and something called Junk “really is” Junk.

This type of neurolinguistic “hallucination” appears so common among humans that it usually remains invisible to us, as some claim water appears invisible to fish, and we will continue to illustrate it copiously as we proceed. On analysis, this “word hypnosis” seems the most peculiar fact about the human race. Count Alfred Korzybski said we “confuse the map with the territory.” Alan Watts said we can’t tell the menu from the meal. However one phrases it, humans seem strangely prone to confusing their mental file cabinets—neurolinguistic grids—with the non-verbal world of sensory-sensual space-time.

As Lao-Tse said in the Tao Te Ching, 2500 years ago,

The road you can talk about is not the road you can walk on.

(Or:

The way that can be spoken is not the way that can be trodden.)

We all “know” this (or think that we do) and yet we all perpetually forget it.

For instance, here in the United States—an allegedly secular Democracy with an “iron wall” of separation between Church and State written into its Constitution–the Federal Communications Commission has a list of Seven Forbidden Words which nobody may speak on the radio or television. Any attempt to find out why these words remain Tabu leads into an epistemological fog, a morass of medieval metaphysics, in which concepts melt like Salvador Dali’s clocks and ideas become as slippery as a boat deck in bad weather.

One cannot dismiss this mystery as trivial. When comedian George Carlin made a record (“Occupation: Foole”) discussing, among other things, “The seven words you can never say on television,” WBAI radio (New York) played the record, and received a fine so heavy that, although the incident occurred in 1973, WBAI, a small listener-sponsored station, recently announced (1990) that they have not yet paid all their legal costs in fighting the case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Eight Wise Men (and One Wise Woman) thereon upheld the Federal Communications Commission.

The highest court in the land has actually ruled on what comedians may and may not joke about. George Carlin has become something more than a comedian. He now has the status of a Legal Precedent. You will pay a heavy fine, in the U.S. today, if you speak any of the Seven Forbidden Words on radio or television–shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.

Robert Anton Wilson left this life January 11, 2007, at 04:50 AM Pacific Time. During his brief 75-year journey on the Third Rock from the Sun, Robert Anton Wilson (RAW), or Bob, was akin to a Renaissance man. He was many things to many different people. While of this Earth, Bob was a Polio survivor, Crowley and Lovecraft reader, Playboy editor, bibliophile, husband, licensed psychologist, father, science fiction writer, conspiracy theory researcher, consciousness explorer, possible alien contactee, literary theorist, Neo-Pagan movement pioneer, guerilla ontologist, Zen Buddhist, Reich and Leary student, candidate for California Governor, founder of the Guns and Dope political Party, advocate for the decriminalization of some drugs, Chaos and Sex Magickian, Burning Man correspondent, futurologist, Subgenius Reverend, Discordian Pope, Agnostic (he was a major proponent of what he would later term “Maybe Logic”), and the inspiration for many.

Born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY, January 18, 1932, RAW who was then Robert Edward Wilson, was stricken with polio at a young age, but was treated with the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Method (which consisted of massage therapy and visualization) in 1934. Because Sister Kenny was not a board certified doctor, she like many of the persons Bob would write about during his lifetime, would be shunned despite the positive results of the afflicted patients (many of whom lived long lives such as Bob himself). After this ordeal, he moved to Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn. The ‘faith healing” episode however, was not the only Fortean experience in his childhood; at the age of four, Bob believed he had a sighting of a spider the size of an Australian Shepherd (dog).

Deep Leaf Production presents from 14 April 1986:

(Sysop Jim) OK, quiet peoples. I present Dr. Robert Anton Wilson.

(Bob Wilson) Cocaine is natures way of telling you the Vatican Bank needs your money more than you do.

(Ben Rowe) Bob, since magick, and the cabala play such a role in your books, I’m curious to know just what you attitude towards such things are, here in the real(?) world. Could you state your feelings briefly?

(Bob Wilson) I regard magick and cabala as doorways to archeological levels of the human brain.

(Ben Rowe) Do you practice any form of it yourself?

(Bob Wilson) Yes.

(Ben Rowe) Care to say what kind?

(Bob Wilson) Ritual invocation, gematria.

(Avatar) To follow up on Ben’s question, are you presently a member of any secret societies or occult orders and could you tell us the names and your grade within them?

(Bob Wilson) That would be telling. Ippsissimus maximus of the Illuminati
and toenail of the Head Temple of the High Priesthood of Eris Esoteric.

(Avatar) Amusing to the last.

(Peter da Silva) I’m not sure what book this was in, I think maybe Right Where you are Sitting Now–you were talking about the possible future of human sexuality. I thought that the sorts of things you were talking about were rather pedestrian. Were you…

(Bob Wilson) Define pedestrian?

(Peter DA Silva) Well, you only considered two sexes, to begin with.

(Bob Wilson) Oh.

(Sysop Jim) A major oversight, no doubt.

(Rodney) When will the next volume of THE HISTORICAL ILLUMINATUS be out and will there be more to follow?

(Bob Wilson) It will be finished a year after I finish writing it. There will be five volumes in this series, of course.

How, how, how did we ever get ourselves in a predicament where an Oriental-style despot controls American medicine and most doctors fear to prescribe what they think best for their patients? Why, over 200 years after a war to liberate ourselves from a half-mad king, have we allowed our lives and health to come under the rule of a totally mad Tsar? And has this monstrous tumor destroyed most of the Constitution only “by accident,” or did its creators have that intent all along?

Well, here’s my theory:

Most people think the TSOG [Tsarist Occupation Government] began its infestation of America with George Bush Sr., when he appointed a Tsar to discombobulate our previously democratic form of government; but Bush had a long C.I.A. career behind him and the C.I.A. had a long, long Tsarist history before they came out in the open with a public and blatant Tsar, a functionary not endowed or permitted by any clause in our Constitution.

Actually, the TSOG began replacing representative democracy in the U.S. way back in 1945, when Gen. Rheinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s Chief of Soviet Intelligence, surrendered to the U.S. Army, after first prudently burying several truckloads of “inside information” about the Soviet Union at a secret location.

Gehlen was not only a master spy but a wizard negotiator. Within a week, he was out of his Nazi uniform and into a U.S. Army General’s uniform; the U.S. intelligence services, in return, got the info about the Soviets, including access to Gehlen’s agents in the Soviet government — a group of Mystical Tsarists who had infiltrated both the Red Army and the KGB.

You see, their leader and Gehlen’s major “asset,” General Andrei Vlassov, had a fervent belief, not just in common or garden Tsarism, but especially in the “mystical Tsarism” espoused in the later half of the 19th Century by the anti-Semitic novelist Dostoyevsky and even more by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an advisor to two Tsars [Alexander III and Nicholas II].

Pobedonostsev, popularly called “The Grand Inquisitor” because of the vast platoons of spies, snoops, agents provocateur and informers he unleashed upon the Russian people , combined theological obsessions with reactionary politics, always an explosive and nefarious mixture.

“Mystical Tsarism” deserves a whole book in itself. especially since it now rules our own country; but we must be brief here. This holy religion, or superstition — as you will –has two major tenets: (1) The Tsar is guided by God and can do no wrong (2) Reason is “cold” and inhuman, faith is “warm” and human; therefore we should ignore reason and guide ourselves by faith in the Tsar, our “Little Father.” I don’t think any of Pobedonostsev’s crew actually believed in the Tooth Fairy, though.

Besides, Roman Catholics of the old school have similar attitudes, but merely prefer a Pope to do their thinking for them instead of a Tsar, and most of us consider them sane, but just “weird.”

Wilson describes himself as a “guerilla ontologist,” signifying his intent to ATTACK language and knowledge the way terrorists ATTACK their targets: to jump out from the shadows for an unprovoked ATTACK, then slink back and hide behind a hearty belly-laugh.

— Robert Sheaffer, The Skeptical Inquirer, Summer 1990

Dublin, 1986. I had given a talk to the Irish Science-Fiction Society and the question period began.

“Do you believe in UFOs?” somebody asked.

“Yes, of course,” I answered.

The questioner, who looked quite young, then burst into a long speech, “proving” at least to his own satisfaction that all UFOs “really are” sun-dogs or heat inversions. When he finally ran down I simply replied,

“Well, we both agree that UFOs exist. Our only difference is that you think you know what they are and I’m still puzzled.”

An elderly gentleman with blonde-white hair and a florid complexion cried out in great enthusiasm, “By God, sir, you’re right. I myself am still puzzled about everything!”

And thus I met Timothy F.X. Finnegan, Dean of the Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen Astro-Anomalistic Society, Dalkey, sometime lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, and founder of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal.

In fact, Prof. Finnegan signed me up as a member of CSICON that very night, in the Plough and Stars pub over our ninth or tenth pint of Ireland’s most glorious product, linn dubh, known as Guiness to the ungodly.

Now I hear that Prof. Finnegan has died, or at least they took the liberty of burying him, and I feel that the world has lost a great man.

The Commitee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) , however, lives on and deserves more attention than it has received hitherto. Prof. Finnegan always asserted that the idea for CSICON derived from a remark passed by an old Dalkey character named Sean Murphy, in the Goat and Compasses pub shortly before closing time on 23 July 1973.

Actually, it started with two old codgers named O’Brian and Nolan discussing the weather. “Terrible rain and wind for this time of year,” O’Brian ventured.

“Ah, faith,” Nolan replied, “I do not believe it is this time of year at all, at all.”

At this, Murphy spoke up. “Ah, Jaysus,” he said, “I’ve never seen a boogerin’ normal day.” He paused to set down his pint, then added thoughtfully, “And I never met a fookin’ average man neither”

(About Sean Murphy nothing else appears in the record except a remark gleaned by Prof. LaPuta from one Nora Dolan, a housewife of the vicinity: “Sure, that Murphy lad never did any hard work except for getting up off the floor and navigating himself back onto the bar-stool, after he fell off, and he only did that twice a night.”)

But Murphy’s simple words lit a fire in the subtle and intricate brain of Timothy F.X. Finnegan, who had just finished his own fourteenth pint (de Selby says his fifteenth pint). The next day the aging Finnegan wrote the first two-page outline of the new science he called patapsychology, a term coined in salute to Alfred Jarry’s invention of pataphysics.

Finnegan’s paper began with the electrifying sentence, “The average Canadian has one testicle, just like Adolph Hitler — or, more precisely, the average Canadian has 0.96 testicles, an even sadder plight than Hitler’s, if the average Anything actually existed.” He then went on to demonstrate that the normal or average human lives in substandard housing in Asia, has 1.04 vaginas, cannot read or write, suffers from malnutrition and never heard of Silken Thomas Fitzgerald or Brian Boru. “The normal,” he concluded “consists of a null set which nobody and nothing really fits.”

Thus began the science of Patapsychology, Prof. Finnegan’s most enduring,and endearing, contribution to the world — aside from the computer-enhanced photos of the Face on Mars with which he endeavored to prove that the Face depicted Moishe Horwitz, his lifelong mentor and idol. This, of course, remains highly controversial, especially among disciples of Richard Hoagland, who believe the Face looks more like the Sphinx, those who insist it looks like Elvis to them, and the dullards who only see it as a bunch of rocks.

CANTO II

Ez told his father, Homer[!] Pound, that
the theme of metamorphoses dominates this canto
[I think Ez has multiple realities, not just mutltiple fathers.
He walks an uneasy waltz between Method Acting and Multiple
Personality Disorder, like some nitwit “channeling,”
but instead of producing their horsesht he somehow
produces great poetry. Robert Graves, oddly, said
all first-rate poetry emerges in semi-trance.
And Batty Billy Blake said a buncha naked angles
dictated his poems to him.]
This Canto seems psychedelic……..

HANG it all, Robert Browning,

a] Emphatic departure from
archaic style & subject of Canto I —
metamorphosis of English language/paideuma
over centuries
b] parody of the typical Browning opening
–abrupt, colloquial and definitely somebody
speaking to somebody else
c] parody of Ez’s own frequent use of that
style of opening in his early poems
(1907-1912)

there can be but the one “Sordello.”
But Sordello, and my Sordello?
The central “problems” of the Cantos–
can we know historic truth? And even
if we do, can we transmute it into
poetry without distorting it?
Which Sordello means more or has
the most accuracy — Browning’s?
Pound’s? The academic historian’s?
Metamorphosis of Sordello from
live man to dead man to man living
again in 3 forms: Browning’s
poetic imagination; Pound’s poetic
imagination; academic history…

The cumulative evidence in such books as Dr. Andrija Puharich’s The Sacred Mushroom, John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, R. Gordon Wasson‘s Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, Robert Graves’ revised fourth edition of The White Goddess, Professor Peter Furst’s Flesh of the Gods, Dr. Weston LaBarre’s The Peyote Cult and Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult of Western Europe, etc., leaves little doubt that the beginnings of religion (awareness of, or at least belief in, Higher Intelligences) is intimately linked with the fact that shamans – in Europe, Asia, in the Americas, in Africa – have been dosing their nervous systems with metaprogramming drugs since at least 30,000 B.C.

The pattern is the same, among our cave-dwelling ancestors and American Indians, at the Eleusinian feasts in Athens and among pre-Vedic Hindus, in tribes scattered from pole to pole and in the contemporary research summarized by Dr. Walter Huston Clark in his Chemical Ecstacy: people take these metaprogramming substances and they soon assert contact with Higher Intelligences.

According the LaBarre’s Ghost Dance, the shamans of North and South America used over 2,000 different metaprogramming chemicals; those of Europe and Asia curiously, only used about 250. Amanita muscaria(the “fly agaric” mushroom) was the most widely used sacred drug in the Old World, and the peyote cactus in the New. Over the past 30-to-40,000 years countless shamans have been trained by older shamans (as anthropologist Carlos Castaneda is trained by brujo – witch-man – Don Juan Matus in the famous books) to use these chemicals, as Dr. Leary and Dr. Lilly have used them, to metaprogram the nervous system and bring in some of the signals usually not scanned. (On the visual spectrum alone ,it has been well known since Newton that we normally perceive less than 0.5 (one-half of one) per cent of all known pulsations.) It can safely be generalized that the link between such sensitive new scannings and personal belief in Higher Intelligences is the most probable explaination of the origins of religion.

Author’s note: This interview was originally published in REVelation magazine (#13, Autumn, 1995): 36-40. The many lists of occult and New Age philosophers betrays its authors’ self-conscious youth: beginners often first learn discourse by referencing. I subsequently joined the Temple of Set in June 1996 after further correspondence with Dr. Michael A. Aquino and other Setians. This was also Robert Anton Wilson’s first interview by email. At least, I think it was RAW who replied, but I’m still not sure . . .

The paleolithism of the future (which for us, as mutants, already exists) will be achieved on a grand scale only through a massive technology of the Imagination, and a scientific paradigm which reaches beyond Quantum Mechanics into the realm of Chaos Theory & the hallucinations of Speculative Fiction.
~~ Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous Zones.

Some may get through the gate in time.
~~ William Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night.

Robert Anton Wilson has always been an enigma. Surfacing in a Faustian Age, his writings, lectures and multimedia projects have become frontline weapons in the war against the forces of unconsciousness. A trickster-like figure, the self styled ‘RAW’ has unleashed the forces of Rebellion and Curiosity, Knowledge and Power, to many over the past 25 years. As the current social structures that have dominated Western Civilization over the past 2000 years disintegrate and Chaos ensues, RAW is amongst a loose cabal of anarchists, scientists and philosophers, all firing the opening shots in a war that will hope to awaken the latent creative forces in humankind.

His work is a sobering antidote to much of the deliberately irrationalist “New Age” theologies or the restrictive dogmas of modern science. Written during one of the 20th Century’s major culture shifts, his many books are weapons used by the few self-conscious people against the smothering herd-like masses. RAW makes us aware of the current low intensity culture warfare in which the sacred is manufactured and commodified, controlled by intellectual castes, and challenges us to liberate ourselves from this neo-feudalism. Whilst many other authors make millions out of flashy psycho-mystical doubletalk about consciousness, ‘change’, and pop psychology, RAW shows us the true methods of self discovery. The landmark Prometheus Unbound (1983) and the later Quantum Psychology (1992) are two key treatises on self liberation from mental addiction to “ideals”, alienation, cultured infantilism, anger fuelled by anti-parental vengeance and other opressions. These modern grimoires are loaded with techniques to move from being what cyberneticist Norbert Weiner called “a controllable thermostat,” to becoming more human.

Our interview was to be conducted by email, as RAW was working frantically to finish several projects. It was his first experience of an interview by email, and he was genuinely excited to get his grips on the super-information highway; previously being exposed to International Relay Chat (IRC) in 1993. His new book Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death was at the printers, and it seemed that RAW was using his ‘trickster’ act to parody the constant queries on various news-groups about his earthly existence. Eagerly awaited by longtime fans, the new book promises to recapture the early Wilson magic that made the original Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) so special.